Before reading Maggie Doherty’s review (“The making of our greater selves,” September 2021), I had just been listening to a podcast called Telling Our Twisted Histories. The show, hosted by Kaniehtiio Horn (Mohawk), seeks to “decolonize our minds” by setting the record straight about Indigenous history, culture and thought.
I haven’t read Douglas Chadwick’s Four Fifths a Grizzly, and I suspect it’s a good book. But the idea of interconnectedness has been around for millennia, part of the Indigenous worldview. People of European descent have dismissed this attitude as primitive as we pursue accumulation, extraction and overconsumption. When writers blame all humans for our present condition, they exclude the voices that have long resisted the resource-focused capitalist/Christian view of the earth and creation. If genetics and other cutting-edge science helps more of us to see ourselves as part of a holistic living system, I’m all for it. But let’s acknowledge that this is not a new idea, and start listening more carefully to people who have been teaching these principles all along.
Zoé Edgecomb
Charlottesville, Virginia
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Our greater selves.
Read More
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
